


Stick With Me

by 1000001nights



Series: Black Widow: Red Ledger [4]
Category: Captain America (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: F/M, Red Room
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-27
Updated: 2015-09-27
Packaged: 2018-04-23 17:23:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,724
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4885348
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/1000001nights/pseuds/1000001nights





	Stick With Me

Wow,” Steve said sombrely.

The park was quietly emptying, and the sun was hovering low on the horizon, threatening to set. The air was humid, and the sounds of the Common had faded away, slowly dissolving into the background as Natasha took a long, slow, deep breath. “Yeah,” she said. “Wow.”  
“I always knew, you know?” Steve said cautiously. “In the back of my mind. I knew. But… it’s hard. The first time is always hard… But that. It’s hard to hear. I’m sorry.”  
“It’s hard to say,” Nat replied, and sighed again, this time more heavily. Though it had been hard, to relive a time in her life she had tried to beat from her memory in every way possible, she nevertheless felt that a weight had lifted. “You may be the only person left alive who knows that about me,” Nat continued. “My files are out there, but even that wasn’t in them.”  
“That’s a heavy burden to bear,” Steve said. “I’m glad if I can take some of that weight off.”  
“Thanks,” Nat said. She wanted to smile, but the effort exhausted her, and she couldn’t manage it. “Do you want to keep walking?” Steve asked. Nat thought for a moment. She was tired, and comfortable where they were, wrapped in Steve’s jacket with no one around, almost like they really were normal. But it was no use running from what she’d known was coming all along. “No,” she said, “let’s head back.”  
“Okay. Lead the way.”

 

The brisk afternoon promised a cool, pleasant evening. The walk from the Common to the safe house was a short one, but they found some measure of enjoyment in it. They didn’t speak much, instead lingering in the calm silence between one chapter of the story and another. It would be easier to keep talking in the safe house itself. In a way, it was like home. It was their own.  
When they’d arrived in the city, they’d almost had their pick of apartments in Boston; apparently SHIELD still held some influence in the world. As such, they’d chosen one just away from the city centre, inconspicuous enough so as not to draw attention, and removed from any bustling areas, like Faneuil Hall, or the wharf.  
The day began to darken as Natasha and Steve made their way back. Natasha had often felt that the calm of the evening relaxed her. She liked the quiet of the city, and the distant noises of the emptying streets. As gentle orange lights began to flicker to life in the windows they passed by, she felt that sensation come over her again, and the dark past faded away into the calm, peaceful present.  
Steve was hard to read as he walked along beside her. He looked up and down the streets curiously, peering down alleys and into the windows of shops, closing down for the day. He smiled politely at people as they passed by, so much so that Nat had to occasionally nudge him, to remind him they were trying not to draw attention to themselves. He took it in stride. He would apologize and continue on, as if nothing in the world had changed. “I’ve never been to Boston,” he said. “Wait… I may have had a performance here. But I never really got outside the theatres, back then.”  
“What do you think of it, now you’re here?” Nat asked absently.  
“I dunno,” Steve said. “It’s no New York.”  
“I knew you’d say that.”  
“Oh, now I’m predictable?” Steve smiled.  
“Your jokes are a little tired.”  
“Well, they are, what? 70 years old?”  
“My point exactly,” Nat said.  
“If I knew being funny was going to be an important part of being Captain America,” Steve said, “I would have paid closer attention to Bucky when - ”  
He stopped. Nat looked up at him with genuine concern in her eyes, and raised her hands gently towards his face. “It’s okay,” she said. “Don’t worry. Steve? You’re alright.”  
“I’m not the Hulk, Nat,” he said, but his caution was evident in his voice. “I just… It hits me sometimes. I… I don’t want to talk about it.”  
“I get it,” Nat said. “The past is hard to talk about, sometimes.”  
“Trust me,” Steve replied, “it’s worse when it comes back to bite you.”  
“Come on,” Nat said. “We’re almost at the safe house.”

“Where the hell have you guys been?”  
Sam Wilson was waiting for them when they arrived. He had the TV on, and its glow, and the sound of whatever game Sam was watching, filtered in from the other room. He was at the fridge when they slipped in the door, and he shut it with his foot as he balanced a pair of drinks and a bowl of some leftovers in his hand. “You guys hungry, or what?”  
“We just went to get some coffee,” Steve said awkwardly.  
“And some fresh air,” Nat added, slipping off Steve’s coat, hoping Sam hadn’t seen. “We’re fine.”  
“Oh, yeah I see,” he said, turning back to the other room. “I can tell when I’m a third wheel, guys. You want me to leave, I’ll go. You just say the word.”  
He was joking, but it hit a little too close to home, and Nat and Steve didn’t talk much as they made their way into the living room with Sam. He flopped down on the couch, and started eating out of the serving bowl with a fork; it was chilli, and it was still cold. “You want me to heat that up for you?” Steve asked.  
“No, it’s fine like this,” Sam said. “It’s a three point game with 40 seconds left. I don’t have time to heat up food.”  
“That’s why I offered,” Steve said.  
“Just sit man, you’re blocking the TV.”  
Nat smiled and rolled her eyes, and Steve joined Sam for the rest of the game; the Knicks lost. Nat didn’t see much of Steve until the TV went dark, and he and Sam were finished talking. She couldn’t help but listen in, through the walls, from the kitchen. The apartment was small (despite having three bedrooms) and it was hard enough not to overhear nearly everything that was said, but Nat was anxious, and she needed to know if Steve would let anything about their conversation slip. It wasn’t about lack of trust; she trusted Steve, and Sam, to a degree. It was just a general anxiety, about having her secrets out there in the world, and having someone - someone close to her, at that - know them, have them in their head, and have that chance to speak them, whenever they wanted. That’s the power she gave to anyone who she told. That’s the fear she’d lived with, and the reason she’d kept everything bottled up, for years.  
Of course, honourable Steve Rogers said nothing.  
It was after ten o'clock when Steve and Sam were finished talking, and Sam finally got ready to retire. He gave both of them an update on the chatter he’d monitored while they were out, but there was nothing of real value. They’d tracked their best lead to Boston, and it hadn’t led to anything so far. Nat was finding it hard to care. She was preoccupied.  
“So that’s it,” Sam concluded, “unless you guys found anything out there that you wanna tell me about.”  
“Like I said,” Steve responded at once, “just coffee.”  
“You hate coffee,” Sam said, but he didn’t press the issue. He understood, maybe not as well as he might have if he knew Steve or Nat as well as they knew each other, but he understood enough not to press. He was speaking to Captain America, after all. “Alright, well I’m gonna leave you guys to it. Maybe I’ll go get some coffee tomorrow, seeing as that’s what we’re doing now.”  
“Night Sam,” Steve said, keeping his tone friendly.  
“Yeah,” Sam said. “Good night.”  
He walked off silently, but Nat could tell he had no ill will in his voice. Just frustration, if that. Sam was a good man. Steve chose his companions well.  
“I feel like we’re keeping something from him,” Steve said quietly, when Sam’s door finally closed. Nat shook her head.  
“We’re not,” she said. “But we should be more careful about what we do, if we decide to speak again out of the safe house. That was my mistake. I should have been smarter.”  
“Hey,” Steve said gently, and he took Nat’s hand as she waved it erratically in front of her face. “It’s alright. Stop blaming yourself. You need to let that go.”  
“I know,” she said, and gently slid her hand out of his.  
“Do you want to keep talking? You don’t have to.”  
“No,” Nat said. “I mean yes, I do. But I know. I know I don’t. But I want to.”  
“Alright,” Steve said, “I’m all ears.”  
“Okay. Find me a drink first.”

***

I ran. It was the only thing I could do. I knew I was free, but I knew just as certainly that they’d come after me eventually. I was their crown jewel, their greatest prize, and without me, they had wasted years of training, energy, and government money. Even back then, barely 17 years old, I knew they wouldn’t let that happen. So I ran. I ran as far as I could go.  
I had to stay out of the cities. That was the first thing. While the cities were populated, and I could disappear into any crowd, I knew I would always be wondering who among those crowds was actually trying to hunt me down. I also assumed that the agents of the Red Room would be more likely to be based out of urban locations than rural ones. My next option, then, was to dissolve into the wilds, hiding in villages and between towns, where I might truly disappear. I didn’t know where I was headed - out of Russia, I guess - but I knew I had to go somewhere else, and never come back.  
I was grateful for my training in those days. It was because of it that I survived. I knew how to stay out of sight when I didn’t want to be detected, how to draw or divert attention when necessary, and how to fight and struggle to survive, better than I ever had before.  
It was rough. I stole. I fought. But I never killed. I knew I had the Bites, if I ever needed them, but after what happened with Ivan… Truthfully, I was afraid. I was afraid of what the program had done to me, that I could do that, and that it felt so… easy. So simple. It wasn’t a struggle. It didn’t need to be. It was a nearly bloodless death. It was too easy. So though I knew I had them, just in case, if I got into a tight spot, if I needed to escape, to fight to stay alive… Other than that, they stayed off. I didn’t use them. It wasn’t right.

At first, it wasn’t so bad; I feel like I say that a lot. Maybe I’m just hardy. Maybe I’m stupid. But it felt that way, anyway. Being free, even alone and on the run, was better than being in there, in that room, with those people, doing… whatever they asked. Outside, in the breeze, under the sky, I could do whatever I wanted.  
I remember walking through a forest, near the beginning. I say ‘the beginning,’ but that might be misleading. It took me weeks to get into the proper wild, well out of whatever city the Red Room was based out of; Moscow, I learned later. Beyond the city, beyond the suburbs and the nearby towns, the trees were all pine, spruce, that kind of thing. Hardy, and green even in the snow. The taiga, it’s called. A boreal forest that runs across most of the northern part of Russia, below the tundra; they have some in Canada too. I’d like to go there, if I ever get the chance. It was relaxing. The trees muffle the noise, but they kind of cycle it too; sounds echo, things speak across vast expanses, and I never truly felt alone. This was a bad thing, as well. In the beginning, I never knew when someone was close or a hundred yards away. The crack of a branch that I’d stumble upon after a day of walking would sound like the snap of a twig by my makeshift bedroll the night before. But I learned. They’d taught me that, too; how to adapt, how to change, how to evolve. I learned the language of the forest, and soon it spoke in tongues I could understand.

That’s how I found them. That’s how I found the men who took me in.

To most people I passed, I was a gypsy, a vagrant. When they looked at me - if they looked at all - they saw a slinking shadow, which would soon be gone. I was never anything anyone paid any mind to. That’s how I got by, and how I had to live. I knew that, if someone associated with the Red Room spotted me, even for a second, I’d have weeks of danger on my hands. They were as good as me, if not better, and I would have a hard time eluding them.  
But this group was different. Their eyes were keen, and they had a good sense of what was going on around them. Not like someone trained to it, not like the Red Room, more like someone born to it, like an animal. Instinct.  
I first heard them for the first time in the forest. I’d been camped out for months, trying to find a way out, a path, a route, a road, anything; it didn’t occur to me until later that I had been going in circles. It was lucky for me, then, that I was camped out in the woods that night, between towns I haunted, slipping in invisibly, and returning laden with supplies for a few days. I never slept in the towns. I’d learned my lessons early on, and had always sought natural shelter when I bedded down; caves, and failing that, protective rock barriers, or even a cliff face, where animals were unlikely to venture, and people were too frightened to go. I thought I was alone. The forest whispered that it was safe to sleep. But that night, with all this buzzing in my head, I heard them as I lay there, and I froze.  
They were like a breath in the breeze, almost undetectable. But they were there. Moving as a group. Organized. Synchronized. A pack, but not animals. Boots on stone. I was awake in a moment, but my body refused to move. The night seemed to deepen around me, growing more black, like I was sinking beyond the depths of light into the Atlantic. The stars were veiled by smoky clouds, and the silent heartbeat of the forest - all the sounds that said it was alive - drifted into muffled silence as my ears strained to hear them. Human, undeniable. What do I do? I thought frantically. Do I run? Do I fight? Do I stay here and hide, and leave it to fate that they don’t find me?  
The decision was made for me. Paralyzed by fear and by my own blindness in the dark, I listened for the next two hours as the boots slowly made their way away from me. They were travellers, not hunters, moving from one town to the next. Why they chose to move at night still worried me, but that they were not on my trail allowed me to relax. They didn’t find me, and they wouldn’t for three more days.  
I followed them, after I woke the next morning. They were good, clever in the way they picked their trail, but they didn’t cover their tracks. They didn’t expect anyone was following them. I found them by the end of that first day, bedded down in an abandoned barn just outside the next town. I knew the place, but had never thought to sleep there. I watched the, as they prepared, setting warnings and traps, posting lookouts and sleeping in shifts; I barely slept that first night. I was so engaged, so thrilled to see other people. Others like me.

It was clear from the start, they didn’t belong anyway. They were outcasts, runaways or vagabonds - criminals, I learned later - wandering along the outskirts, keeping to the shadows, hiding when they needed to, but taking action when they felt bold enough. I don’t remember why I was so fascinated by them, but thinking back, it may have been that I trusted them, in an odd, detached kind of way. They had something to lose, too, and were more than likely just as desperate and destitute as I was; in short, they weren’t hunting me. It wasn’t long before I began to think of them as potential allies.  
They were skilled and tough, willing to do anything. I watched them as they stole from barns and storehouses where no one was around. I watched them as they held up shopkeepers and small time business owners for all the money they could carry, and met up with dubious contacts to pick up shipments that they smuggled to the next town. They didn’t look like a frightening bunch - most weren’t much older than me, in their early twenties - but they were effective. They hurt people, yes, but they needed to. So did I. I was horrified the first time they killed someone, after a delivery went awry and their partner failed them, but by the third or fourth time, I began to see the crooked justice in it. No one died who wasn’t guilty of some cardinal sin of living off the grid. They were good, and I grew to like them.  
One man among them stood out. He had short cropped, dusty blonde hair, and a good build, like a gymnast or a swimmer. He often wore his arms bare, threaded with practical muscle, gloves on his delicate, skillful hands, made of fine leather that looked wrong on his otherwise shabby person. His most defining feature, though, was his weapon of choice: a bow and arrow.  
When they found me, when our paths finally crossed, he was the one who took me in. He kept me safe, and I was grateful for it. I still am, to this day.

It was a dreary afternoon that day, dark and overcast, and the air was wet all over, especially between the villages, in the trees where we stayed out of sight. I had begun to refer to the band and myself as we, though I wasn’t a part of their group yet. I guessed at that time that they were aware of me, but since I obviously wasn’t a threat, they paid me no mind. I stole from the places they raided, taking scraps they left behind, and sometimes I found little parcels left for me, hastily wrapped in ugly, patchwork packaging, but visible along the path they’d trod, the one I followed. It had been going on for almost two weeks, and so in a way, I did kind of belong with them, even if it wasn’t yet official.  
It was just outside a small village that they finally found me. I never learned its name. I never gave much thought about where I was back then. The Red Room felt like it wasn’t on this planet, hidden away somewhere deep inside the moon, or on an asteroid, dark and abyssal, where no one could leave. In truth, I had only just made it beyond the city in my weeks of wandering, not more than a day or two’s drive.  
The village in question was old, with crooked streets perfect for an ambush. Had I not been so enamoured with this band of rogues, I would have been more careful, and paid closer attention to what they were doing, and where they were leading me; in retrospect, it was obviously a trap.  
It was the archer who led me initially, keeping a suspicious watch over his shoulder as he parted marketplace crowds and stayed just far enough ahead of me to keep my mind working, keep my eyes on him, keep my pace frantic. When he disappeared, others took up his cause, and soon I was being led in ten different directions by every member of the gang. By the end, I was deep in their web, and though I realized belatedly - frustratedly - what they had done, it was far too late.  
I turned, and found an arrow thrust in my face.  
Guns are frightening enough, but to have an arrow pointed at your chest, the string tense, muscles in the arms of the archer straining for release, it is truly sobering. I backed down from the deadly potential of that weapon, and he quickly unslung the arrow and replaced it in his quiver when it was clear I had nowhere else to go. I raised my hands, and surrendered.

“Not bad for a kid,” one of them said, in an ugly provincial accent. They all sauntered out after him, all of them thin and savage, dressed in patchwork rags; stolen leather jackets, ripped jeans, faded khakis, rough military boots, gloves, and scarves like gypsies. There were ten of them in all, nine of them men, and a single woman among them. It was clear from the start, she most of all wanted nothing to do with me. I learned later that she evidently feared that I - as a budding woman myself - would inevitably look upon her as a kind of mother figure, and she wanted nothing to do with that sort of responsibility. All the same, I hated her as much as she hated me. The rest were less cruel - “gut her for the dogs,” were the woman’s first words to me - but they were all rude in the beginning, shoving me and examining my own rags. All of them except the archer.  
“Get off her,” he spat, throwing one of the weaker men aside. The leader, a crooked hunter named Volkov, snarled at the archer, but did nothing in response. “She’s good,” Volkov said to the archer, “but not worth the time. She has nothing on her worth taking.”  
“We didn’t bring her here to rob her,” the archer said, as if I wasn’t there. “We brought her here because I want to ask her some questions.”  
His Russian was strange, I remember even then. I couldn’t place it, even with my well-trained ear. The girls in the Red Room were from all across the country, and I heard many accents from them, and from the teachers. His was difficult to place. I learned later that it was because he did not speak Russian natively. He was not Russian at all.  
“You have five minutes, Barton,” Volkov said. “If she has nothing, we leave her. If you don’t catch up with us, we leave you.”  
“Your funeral,” Barton said.  
“Guns work just as well as bow and arrow.”  
“Only a man who couldn’t fire either would say that,” the archer said with a slim grin. He looked at me. His eyes were bright, and had a kindness in them, something I was unused to. It made me anxious, in a funny kind of way. “May I ask you some questions?” He asked gently.  
I looked from him to Volkov, to the others, who were circling, but keeping their distance. “Sure,” I said. “Fine.”  
The archer crossed his arms nonchalantly, and waited for the others to filter out of the alley, just out of earshot. “Hello,” he said. “My name is Clint.”  
“Nat… Natalia,” I replied. He crouched down, but he was not that much taller than me that he needed to. His face close to mine, I could see he was not much older than me, twenty five maybe, with a fine rim of stubble along his square chin. “Hello Natalia,” he said. His voice had no ounce of threat in it, but his friendly demeanour seemed forced. “How long have you been following us?”  
“Three days,” I lied; it had been much longer.  
“Why?” he said casually.  
“I don’t know.”  
“I don’t think that’s true.”  
“It helped me get food,” I said.  
“Aren’t strangers dangerous?” he asked. I could sense the mocking tone lying under his words. “Where are your parents?”  
“Don’t know.”  
“I believe that,” he said. He looked down at my wrist, and I tried feebly to hide it under my sleeve. I hadn’t used them at all for weeks, and had nearly forgotten they were there. “What’s that?” he asked.  
“Nothing.”  
“Fancy sort of nothing,” he said.  
“Why are you talking to me?” I spat. “Your friends wanted to rob me!”  
“Can I let you in on a little secret, Nat?” he said, leaning closer. “They’re not my friends.”  
“What are they?”  
“You seem like a smart girl, Nat. So I’m gonna be honest with you. They’re a means to an end. I need them, and they need me.”  
“So?”  
“So, I was honest with you. You be honest with me. Right? That seems fair.”  
“I guess.”  
“So… What’s the deal with those things on your wrist?”  
“I stole them,” I said, almost automatically. “I don’t know what they do.”  
Clint tipped his head curiously, like a puppy hearing a foreign noise for the first time, but he nodded, and seemed satisfied. “Okay Nat,” he said. “Your training is good. Really good, I’m actually impressed. But you’re all alone, and the world is big. So I was thinking… Would you want to come with me and my guys? Just for a little while.”  
“If I do,” I asked, “where will we go?”  
“That depends,” he said. “We go where there’s money, or food. You understand that.”  
“Don’t you want to go somewhere?” I asked.  
“I don’t know,” Clint replied, raising an eyebrow. “Sounds like you do.”  
“I want to get out of Russia,” I said quickly. I sized him up as he stood to his fullest again. He wasn’t much bigger than me, but the gap in our age showed in his hardened body, built up from experience, hard work, and the struggle of learning the craft of his weapon. “Now why would you want to do that?” he asked. He was mocking me again, or something like it.  
“I just do,” I said defensively. “Everybody has secrets.”  
Clint laughed, and I didn’t know why.  
“Okay,” he said, “you come with me, and I’ll see if we can help you. But I may need your help first. That make sense?”  
“I’m not a child,” I said angrily. “But fine. I’ll come. For a little while.”  
“You’re a closed off girl, Nat,” Clint chuckled. “Just stick with me, you’ll be fine.”  
“I’ll be fine. Either way.”  
“I’d be willing to bet you would,” Clint said. “Don’t worry. This will be a good partnership. I can feel it.”

I walked with him back to the gang, and we disappeared from the village, never to see it again. For a while, Clint was true to his word. We wandered, we stole, we fought and shot and the gang members killed some people that crossed them. I was useful, for a time, and our path took us on a meandering tour through the area surrounding Moscow.  
I didn’t know it then, but we’d been going in as much a circle as I had been when I started out. We weren’t heading away from the city, but back towards it, towards the Red Room itself. These men weren’t agents of the program, far from it. But they had their own designs, and whispers of what went on in that room had reached even their ears, on some unknown channel, some hidden pathway. I was almost 19 when Clint finally asked me the question that had been burning in his mind since he first learned of my existence, since before that day when he looked down at my Widow’s Bites, and knew what he saw.  
“Okay Nat,” he asked, “where is the Red Room?”


End file.
